In an announcement made at an analyst summit it hosted in Shenzhen, Huawei revealed that it will launch its first 5G smartphone in the third quarter of 2019. Other mobile brands like Vivo, Xiaomi, Nokia brand licensee HMD Global, Sony, LG, HTC, Oppo, and ZTE are also working to release their own 5G phone to be launched around the same time. This announcement was made by the company’s rotating Chairman Eric Xu. Huawei also announced it will launch an end-to-end 5G solution in the second half of 2018.
Huawei also confirmed it would release a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot that is capable of 5G speeds before the second half of 2019.
Both the hotspot device will feature Huawei-designed modems (Balong 5G01 chip) to attain those 5G speeds. But we are not yet sure which chip will be used on the phone.
Speaking during his keynote at the 2018 edition of the Huawei Analyst Summit (HAS), Xu said 5G will result in faster speed and decrease networking costs.
“We are fully committed to 5G investment and by the second half of this year, we’re going to launch an end-to-end 5G solution,” Xu said on Tuesday.
“5G is just another product line at Huawei. It is a natural evolution of the technology – from 2G to 3G to 4G and now 5G,” Xu told the gathering.
According to Xu, there is no fundamental difference between 4G and 5G and for the consumers, it is all about faster speed. “We don’t have other material differences in experiences for the consumer between the two technologies,” he said.
The executive said that 4G infrastructure today is robust and the 5G technology will first be targeted at dense areas to meet growing demand from the consumers for more bandwidth.
This is the highest measured throughput for a mobile network in 3.5GHz band with 100MHz bandwidth and end-to-end network latency of approximately 1 msec, the company said.
“We have been focusing on developing 5G ecosystem and use cases and the show with Bharti Airtel impressively demonstrates the performance capability of 5G in 3.5GHz band,” said Emmanuel Coelho Alves, Director, Wireless Marketing, Huawei HQ.
The company, which began investing in 5G research in 2009 recording successes along the way, is aiming to invest $600 million in the 5G technology by end of this year. In February, Huawei and telecom services provider Bharti Airtel announced to have successfully conducted 5G network trial under a test set-up in India. The trial was conducted at Airtel’s Network Experience Centre in Manesar (Gurugram). During the test trial, a user throughput of more than 3Gbps was achieved.
